National Food Strategy and Food Security

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Kate Green

Thursday 27th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

I make a very good chana dal.

The debate is about food security, which the right hon. Lady covered in detail, but also about the national food strategy. I pay tribute to Henry Dimbleby, who put a huge amount of work into the strategy. I have a well-thumbed copy of the strategy document; it is almost like a Bible to me, giving an overview of all the different aspects of food policy and what we need to do.

I think Henry should feel let down by the inadequacy of the Government’s response to that document. I want to highlight some of the things the Government should be doing more on. The work was commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and he was an executive director there. It is disappointing that the Government are not treating that as the Bible for how to take things forward.

Food poverty is now far worse than when Henry Dimbleby started that work. We have seen frightening figures from the Office for National Statistics this week showing how prices of basic foodstuffs have shot up: vegetable oil by 65%; pasta by 60%; bread by 38%. The Food Foundation recently reported that 18% of households, and 26% of households with children, have experienced food insecurity in the past month. That is nearly 10 million adults, and around 4 million children. Many of those surveyed said they have cooked less, eaten food cold, turned off fridges and washed dishes in cold water because of concern about energy bills and rising inflation. Many were buying less fruit and vegetables.

On “Newsnight” last week, the former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, said she had never seen child food poverty on this scale before. She called, as did Henry Dimbleby, for Cobra to be convened. I raised that at Cabinet Office questions this morning and got a response about how the Prime Minister wanted compassion to be at the heart of what he did, but I did not get a response on how a cross-departmental approach to tackling food poverty could be steered by the Cabinet Office. A cross-departmental approach is needed. As Henry Dimbleby said when giving evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee last week, we need a structural mechanism to drive progress. If it is not Cobra, I would like to know from the Minister what mechanism he envisages would work.

Cobra is also very good at looking at granular detail, which is important because this calls for a localised response. We can express some generalities about food poverty, but Bristol, for example, which is known to be quite a foodie place, also has two of the top five food deserts in the entire country. There are estates in south Bristol where it is very difficult to access affordable and healthy food. So this needs to be done at a local level. My first question to the Minister is about how he sees that overarching response. Would DEFRA be leading? Does he see a role for Cobra?

In terms of swift action, the national food strategy is clear that extending eligibility for free school meals is one of the best levers we have. Extending it just to families on universal credit would feed an extra 1.4 million children. Healthy Start and holiday hunger schemes are also important.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing attention to the importance of families being able to afford healthy food—all the more important given the rising cost of living. In relation to Healthy Start, she will know that take-up of these essential vouchers that provide fresh fruit and veg, and milk and vitamins to pregnant and new mums and their children is at only about 60% across the country. Will she support me in calling on the Government to work across Departments so that those applying for universal credit who are also eligible for Healthy Start are automatically registered for that Healthy Start support?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. As I understand it, next week she will introduce a Bill, which I very much support and I hope that the Government will, too.

I do not have much time to talk about the importance of healthy diets, but does the Minister know what has happened to the health inequalities White Paper? Will we see that soon?

The national food strategy approach on junk food is quite straightforward: it is about restricting advertising and promotions, and targeting ingredients. Some people I know are concerned that that will mean increased costs for consumers, who can ill-afford to feed their families as it is. However, the suggestion is not to tax food in the shops but, for example, to tax sugar in the huge quantities bought by the food manufacturers, so it would be in their interests to reformulate their products to avoid that tax. We saw that happen with the soft drinks levy. I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks about that.

There is all this concern about the nanny state and not wanting to dictate to people what they do and do not eat. However, we accept that action on smoking is important for public health reasons and that action on alcohol abuse is important. When we look at the cost to the NHS of diet-related diseases and ill health, it seems a no-brainer to me to take an interventionist approach on this, too. It is not about telling people what they can and cannot eat; it is about helping them to make the right choices for themselves and their families, making sure that the education is out there and giving financial incentives such as the Healthy Start scheme.

In terms of other levers that could be used, public procurement could make a huge difference. The DEFRA consultation on public sector food and catering closed on 4 September. Could the Minister tell us when we will hear the results from that?

This may be going back to chickpeas, but the Mayor of New York, Eric Adams, who describes himself as an imperfect vegan—I suppose that is better than nothing—has introduced a scheme whereby the default option for catering in New York hospitals is plant-based. That does not mean that people cannot choose meat-based options or things that are not plant-based, but apparently it is proving to be really popular and there is good take-up. Again, that is a way of encouraging people down the path of taking a healthier option. I hope the Minister agrees that much of the food served in our hospitals—regardless of whether it is of animal origin—is not the sort of food we should be serving people we are trying to make healthier and better.

[Kate Green]

In that regard, my hon. Friend will be pleased to know that Healthy Start does support the provision of plant-based meals.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am glad to hear that; it is a good step. I will not go into the environmental arguments. I hope that people accept that I am not trying to force people down a particular path, but the Climate Change Committee, the UN and several Cabinet Ministers have accepted that, for environmental and health reasons, we could do with reducing meat consumption.

I turn to the need for a land-use framework. I understand that the Government intend to publish one next year. Land is a finite, scarce resource, but we do not always treat it as such. We need to be strategic about how we use it for food, carbon sequestration, biodiversity and fuel. Where possible, “best and most versatile” land should be used for food growing,

It is nonsense for the Government to seek to reclassify poorer-quality soil as BMV as part of their war on solar farms. Is that ill-thought-out proposal still Government policy? It was a few weeks ago; I hope the Minister understands that I am finding it quite difficult to keep up. Could he tell me whether the proposal to reclassify poorer-quality land as BMV is still going to be brought through?

After yesterday’s Prime Minister’s questions, I am also not sure where the Government stand on onshore wind. Will the Minister clarify that? I am glad, however, to see that the fracking ban is back, but that one U-turn—or two U-turns—has left many casualties on the road in its wake. Again, that goes to the whole issue of what land is best used for. As Henry Dimbleby told the EFRA Committee last week, over the seven or eight decades since the war, we have been steadily producing more and more food on the same amount of land. He said:

“That is making the land sick, destroying the environment and driving out nature.”

What he said about the need for the land to be carbon-negative—not net zero—was spot on. The potential for carbon sequestration is huge, and by taking some of the least productive agricultural land out of production, we could enhance biodiversity at the same time as creating natural carbon sinks.

Some 20% of our farmland—mostly peatland and upland—produces only 3% of our calories. Henry Dimbleby argued that about 5% of that should come out of farming. The rest of the farmland would be higher yielding, with lower inputs and lower environmental costs.

Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Kate Green

Committee stage
Thursday 30th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q It might be quite difficult to quantify the extent to which—

Dr Edenborough: It is all worked on probabilities. You would not test every grain of rice; you would test a few thousand and extrapolate. That is the way that all damages cases work.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Q I want to take this point about damage and liability a little further. You look alarmed, but actually I want you to simplify it a bit. The way you are describing it to me, I think the onus will really be on the person claiming that they have been damaged to make a claim and go to court. There may then be some difficulty for them. I think you are saying that there would be less difficulty in proving causation, because there would be a marker, but there would be considerable difficulty in proving the extent and the fact of the damage that had occurred. Is that correct?

Dr Edenborough: Yes, on both points.

Prisoners: Parental Rights

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Kate Green

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hosie. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) on securing the debate. We have had some excellent speeches, and Westminster Hall comes into its own in debates on such topics with cross-party consensus.

I want to turn the debate around slightly and focus on the 200,000 or so children a year who will have a parent in prison, in England and Wales. That is a rough figure—a Government estimate—and it is difficult to be more precise. We have heard various figures about women in prison. It is estimated that 66% of women in prison have a child under the age of 18, and that a third of them have a child under five, although I have also seen the figure of 51%. Far more children have a father than a mother in prison and there are likely to be a disproportionate number of black and minority ethnic children with a parent in prison, because of the make-up of the prison population. The statistics on young offenders institutions show that there are also many young parents in prison. I have visited young offenders institutions as an MP and before that as a lawyer working in the criminal field, and those who do so will have seen young mums turning up with their babies, to visit fathers who are themselves children. A freedom of information request from Barnardo’s in connection with its report of December 2015, “Locked out: Children’s experiences of visiting a parent in prison”, found that children make almost 10,000 visits to public prisons each week.

Those are the things that we know about the number of children affected, and the make-up of that group, but we do not know anywhere near as much as we should. There is limited published practice knowledge about working with children of prisoners, and a lack of systematic recording and information-sharing. Prisoners will not always reveal that they have children. In many cases it is a child’s step-parent or the partner of their parent rather than their own father who is in prison, but the child will still clearly be greatly affected. As we have heard, courts, Governments and local services do not routinely ask about the children involved; that information is not reported or recorded. Pressures on the probation service and the lack of sentencing reports also mean that the issue is less likely to be picked up. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) pointed out that people facing custody are not routinely asked about the situation with respect to their children.

When there were riots and looting in London boroughs after the death of Mark Duggan, in quite a few cases women were immediately thrown into custody and no one asked any questions. Single parents were put into custody and no one asked what would happen to their children left at home.

[Kate Green]

Does my hon. Friend support the suggestion that when a parent goes into custody—and particularly if they are the sole parent—there should be a period of perhaps five or seven days after the sentence is imposed and before custody commences to allow them to make arrangements for the care of the child?

[Kerry McCarthy]

That is absolutely the case, although there will always be exceptions, such as when the parent is seen to be a danger to the public. I used to work at a magistrates court, where women would be sentenced to jail because they had not paid television licence fines. It could be said that they knew they were coming to court and might face custody, but sometimes those people had chaotic lives and were not facing up to the seriousness of their situation, and it would be sensible to give them a chance to make arrangements. In America there is a tendency to use a system that gives people time to prepare for a prison sentence; I do not see why we cannot do that here.

Quite often parents going to jail, and their families, keep quiet about the fact that children are involved. That might be because of stigma and shame, or the fear of having their children taken into care. Informal kinship care is often arranged, with friends or family stepping in if the parent with caring responsibilities is sent away. There has been some progress in recognising the role of kinship carers in recent years. Edward Timpson, the former Children and Families Minister, took the issue seriously and did some good work on it, which we need to continue.

I recently wrote to the Children’s Commissioner about the matter. She had launched a very good report that identified about 15 categories of vulnerable children, and I wrote to her flagging up the fact that the categories of children of prisoners and children in informal kinship care should have been listed but were not. There would have been some overlap as, for example, one category was children in local authority care, which could include the children of prisoners; but there was not a specific focus on them. I received a good reply this week, in which the commissioner said:

“I am very keen to include children of prisoners in the next iteration of the work, but identifying the number of such children is a significant challenge. We are currently working with the ONS to link census data with Dept for Education records of children, this should then enable us to estimate the number of children in families where a parent is in prison. Doing this poses some serious challenges, but if we can do it, then we will be able to use this to get lots of additional information.”

Things are not ideal. The information should be available without the need to do various calculations to put together a picture; but it is excellent that the commissioner realises the importance of the work.

It is important to know how many children are affected by parental imprisonment. Such children can face multiple disadvantages, as has been said. Family life is disrupted and it may be necessary to move home. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston mentioned that half of such children have to change schools. In many cases family income will be lost. For children with a parent in prison there is twice the likelihood of poor conduct and mental health problems, according to a 2008 study. Those children are less likely to do well at school and three times as likely to offend: 65% of boys with a convicted father will go on to be convicted. When Hazel Blears was a Home Office Minister we had conversations about work she was doing to try to identify boys, in particular, who were at risk of offending because of their parents’ situation. There is a need to be careful about that, because we do not want to stigmatise or label children—“Because your father was a bad lot and ended up in jail you are going to go the same way.” A sensitive approach is needed, but we must recognise the particular risk for those children.

Trauma can also arise directly from the experience. Children may have seen a parent arrested, sometimes in violent circumstances. They may not have known anything was going on, only for the parent to go off to court one day and disappear. Some children may not even be told that the parent is in jail, and may find out because word has spread around the neighbourhood. Also, visiting a parent in prison is not a pleasant experience. In today’s debate there has been a focus on the importance to prisoners of maintaining contact with their children; and the reoffending figures suggest that that is important. It is estimated that 45% of prisoners lose touch with their families and that prisoners are 39% less likely to reoffend if they receive visitors. We also need to look at the impact on the children, as Barnardo’s has tried to do, because what is good for the prisoners is not necessarily good for the children.

I will briefly mention fathers’ rights. We have spoken about women receiving visits in prison, but male prisoners are treated differently from female prisoners in the system. I entirely accept the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East that in some cases the father clearly should not retain any influence over the children’s lives.

At the moment, in male prisons, children’s visits are classed as a privilege under the incentives and earned privileges scheme. The scheme allocates the duration, frequency and quality of visits according to the behaviour of the offender. That can have quite a severe impact on the frequency and length of visits. Basic status prisoners would be entitled to see their children for a two-hour visit every four weeks, but family visit days are restricted to enhanced prisoners who have displayed exemplary behaviour, for example by studying for qualifications. Therefore, quite a lot of prisoners do not get to have family visit days at all. We could say, “Well, they haven’t earned them,” but we are talking about their families losing that right through no fault of their own.

Children in this situation will often have ambivalent feelings toward their parent, because their parent has perhaps done something deliberately that means they have, in effect, abandoned their child. Children will see that their parent has chosen to do something that means they will be locked up and absent from the home, leaving the children to fend for themselves or endure bullying and stigma at school. They should not be doubly punished for the fact that their father is perhaps not displaying exemplary behaviour in prison; they should be allowed that quality time to try to rebuild the relationship with him.

Under the IEP scheme, fathers’ visits with their children can be withheld at the discretion of the authorities, whereas in female prisons the right is protected, on the basis that children should not be restricted from visiting or contacting the mother because of the mother’s behaviour. The number of visits should not be restricted in order to serve the needs of the incentive schemes, and incentive schemes should not be linked to any access to family visits. That is the rule for mothers, and I do not see why it should not be the case for fathers as well. It is important, and Barnardo’s has called for the IEP scheme in male prisons to be brought into line with that in female prisons.

I will say a little bit about the work of Barnardo’s, an organisation that is proactive in this area and doing some excellent work. In England there is a scheme called i-HOP—the information hub on offenders’ families with children for professionals—which was commissioned by the Department for Education and is run by Barnardo’s. It provides a one-stop information and advice service to support all professionals working with children and families of offenders, including frontline staff, strategic managers and commissioners. It is important that this is placed on professionals’ radar and that they are given advice on how to deal with it.

In 2013, Barnardo’s published a report called “Working with children with a parent in prison”, which referred to two pilot schemes called Empowering the Children of Offenders. The pilots were held in Devon and Bristol. They found that parents often struggled to talk to their children about imprisonment and needed support to do so. They also found that liaising with wider family networks, including grandparents, and with schools was vital to provide full support to a child affected by parental imprisonment. The report highlighted particular issues: problems in identifying the children affected, as I have already said, identifying the children’s rights and working out which children need support. The children of prisoners often do not meet the thresholds for children’s social care services to become involved. That means no work takes place with them, and perhaps the thresholds should be reassessed to ensure they are brought into account.

As part of the i-HOP scheme in Bristol, Barnardo’s worked with Bristol City Council to create Bristol’s “Charter for Children of Prisoners”, which recommended that children should be helped to write letters, make phone calls or visit if they want to; that children with a parent in prison should be better welcomed and respected by prison staff; that children should be told where their parent is and how long they will be there; that they should have an adult they can talk to in confidence; and that when police arrest someone they should take into account the impact on the child and ensure the situation is explained to them. Probably most importantly, it recommended that professionals such as teachers and nurses should know how many children in Bristol have a parent in prison and how to support them.

I will conclude by coming back to my earlier point. This discussion should not just be about the prisoners and their rights; it should be about the children. When we look at the children of prisoners, we should not just look at their relationship with the parent in prison. It should not just be about how often they see them and whether they maintain connection. They will face a lot of issues, whether at school, through poverty in the family home, or through informal arrangements where they may be passed from one friend of their parent to another. We need to look at those children in the community, not just in relation to the prisoners.

Cystic Fibrosis

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Kate Green

Thursday 10th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising the issue of allocation of lungs for transplant. In the north-west of England we have poor levels of transplant. People wait longer and are more likely to die on the waiting list. Does she agree that it is important that the Minister presses for the modelling, which I understand is being carried out, on the impact of a national allocation scheme to be given great attention and accelerated if possible, so that we can have the evidence on the benefits of such a scheme in this country as quickly as possible?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. As I have said, it makes such a difference if more people come forward as donors, not just for lung transplants but for many other types of donation as well, from blood through to other organs. I urge the Minister to give this the utmost priority, because, as we have said, it can make such a difference to people’s lives.

The Department of Health has advised that the most recent analysis showed no significant difference in allocation across UK lung transplant centres. But the Cystic Fibrosis Trust clearly believes that an improved allocation system could address the shocking fact that one in three cystic fibrosis patients die before they get to the top of the waiting list. So I ask the Minister to review this with NHSBT, and consider the evidence from the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. It would also be helpful if she could provide more information on the current review by the cardiothoracic organs advisory group, and say whether it is considering a national allocation system, as referred to by my hon. Friend, or consulting stakeholders such as the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and specialist centres, and when it is likely to report.

The “Hope for more” report also highlights that 62% of survey respondents reported that psychosocial support during the whole transplant process is insufficient, and concludes:

“The demand for services that assist the family and individuals in coping with cystic fibrosis is drastically underestimated”.

In response to a parliamentary question that I tabled, the Minister explained that decisions on psychosocial support are a matter for clinicians and commissioners, but I would urge further consideration of the report’s findings and how the Department of Health can help to improve provision and ensure that clinicians have the resources that they need, working with commissioners to address gaps in information, support and psychosocial services for patients waiting for a transplant and post-operative.

It is clear that the specialist centres, working with the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, are making an incalculable difference to their patients’ lives. The trust is putting real money into the provision of services for cystic fibrosis patients. In 2012-13, the trust contributed more than £1.6 million to research projects, and more than £1.1 million to clinical care. It also provides a helpline that takes more than 3,000 calls every year, and it is able to provide limited welfare grants to people with cystic fibrosis and their families who are, understandably, struggling with the impact the condition can have on their lives.

I congratulate the Cystic Fibrosis Trust on its work and all those people that I met at the cystic fibrosis centre in Bristol, who were so dedicated and keen to get across to me the fact that with more resources they would be able to do an even better job in coping with the increased number of patients. I hope that the Minister takes that on board.

Immigration Rules: Sponsors

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Kate Green

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

As I was saying, Mr X needs to return to the UK to look after his elderly parents who are recovering from cancer. They used to go on a fairly regular basis to visit him, his wife and child, but they are now too ill and infirm to visit. Mr X has a professional job in Thailand, which he has held down for a long time. It is a decent salary according to local rates, but it is not the equivalent of the £18,600 earnings limit in the UK. It is enough to provide him with the same living standards in Thailand as he would have if he were on that sort of salary in the UK—it is obviously a lot cheaper to live there. Under the new rules, Mr X will have to leave his wife behind while he finds work in the UK, which he is not prepared to do—by which I mean not that he is not prepared to find work, but that he is not prepared to leave his wife behind. They are now considering moving to Spain instead, so that he is reasonably close to his parents and it will be easier for his wife to join him, perhaps becoming a Spanish national, which would then allow them to enter the UK.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. She is describing a situation that we on the all-party group inquiry into family migration have heard several times. Does she agree that there is a further nonsense to the situation she describes? If the family is not able to come in and look after the parents, instead of the family providing care, this will pile costs on for public social care and public health services.

[Kerry McCarthy]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, as she always does. If I understand the Government’s ideological position on this issue, they want to support families and very much approve of carers taking on responsibility for elderly parents or others within their family network. The rule that we are talking about operates to prevent that from happening.

The second case features Mr Z and Ms Z who came to see me in my constituency surgery a few weeks ago. They were married in the UK in March 2011. She is a British citizen and her husband, who had been living and working in the UK for six years under a valid work permit, is South African. He was in highly paid professional work in the UK, but soon after they married, he was made redundant. Although he could probably have secured another job at a similarly high salary in the UK, they decided to take a chance and move to Cape Town for a couple of years.

After two years in South Africa, however, they have decided that they want to return to the UK, but the rules changed while they were away. He will not be allowed to join his wife in the UK unless she earns more than £18,600—despite the fact that he is a highly skilled computer programmer who could expect to earn perhaps £60,000 a year in the UK. Before they left for Cape Town, my woman constituent was earning £26,000 a year as a pub manager. As she has been out of work for two years in Cape Town, however, there is a gap in her CV, so she is unlikely to be able to walk straight back into a manager’s position, although she aspires to do so in a couple of years’ time. Wages in the pub trade are not particularly high, so it is likely she will start on a salary below £18,600. As I said, they would have a joint income as a family of about £75,000 because her husband could get a well-paid job, but under the new rules it is based on her income, so he would not be able to join her.